Fighting For The Manic Pixie Dream Girl
Can a man invent a term that's supposed to define women?
There was a period of time in 1990s when I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I seemed to attract a lot of attention from boys, which I genuinely enjoyed, but something felt off.
There was an uncomfortable feeling that came along with the way some boys and men seemed to look at me, something I couldn’t name until I was solidly in my 30s. Before then, it felt like I knew 2+2 should equal four, but somehow I kept coming up with 3.75. I should like all this attention, I should be grateful and flattered.
These guys are nice, what’s wrong with me?
At the core of that experience was the sense that there was something about me that attracted attention. Something I couldn’t turn off, even when I tried.
Worse, once I started dating someone and they got that nebulous, hard-to-define thing from me, I became simply too much. Too much of something they didn’t expect.
When Nathan Rabin, a film and culture critic, coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” in 2007, I found a word to describe how I felt people saw me: quirky, surprising, cute, sexy, a little bit scary in my unpredictability.
In 2007, I was a mom with two babies. If I’d ever actually been vibrant and carefree, those days were behind me. I didn’t relate to the initial characters he cited, like Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown or Natalie Portman’s in Garden State, but I understood Rabin’s point.
Recalling some of the female characters on the most popular MPDG lists, I started piecing together what I could never quite name, what didn’t add up. Thinking about the MPDG caricature, I realized the guys who looked at me like that didn’t just want to date or kiss or love me — they also wanted a part of me to keep, to consume and take with them. That’s why they so often ended up angry. I wasn’t what they wanted.
I thought of Drew Barrymore in Mad Love, a film released during my senior year of high school. Casey was the first film character whom I felt represented what it felt like to be me: a girl with short hair, a temper, a willingness to break a few rules and an alternating sweetness and sexuality. I didn’t quite fit in anywhere, I drew a lot of attention, and I knew how to captivate boys.
I also had a dark side that left them empty when it took over.
I’m fortunate that my suite of diagnoses (depression, ADHD) are less stigmatized than Barrymore’s character’s bipolar disorder, but when my depression struck — or when I simply felt safe enough to no longer perform “quirky, fun girl” — guys didn’t know what to make of me. One of my exes described me as a comet; I lit up the the sky so brightly that when my light went dim, it was disorienting.
Until the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” hit mainstream vernacular, I didn’t have a word for what it felt like to be wanted solely so that parts of you could be absorbed.
Rabin explains that the MPDG is an archetype “that taps into a particular male fantasy: of being saved from depression and ennui by a fantasy woman who sweeps in like a glittery breeze to save you from yourself, then disappears once her work is done.”
Rabin shared that opinion in an article where he says that he wishes he’d never coined the term, seven years after he first wrote the words in that A.V. Club film review.
I was, and still am, livid that Rabin wishes he hadn’t coined the term.
Yes, he cites some good reasons for wanting a take-back. For instance, the number of young women who made MPDG status a personal goal, missing the point entirely. There were also revolutionary portrayals of “quirky” women mistakenly categorized within Rabin’s limited definition of MPDGs — women written as whole human beings, like Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Ruby Sparks in Zoe Kazan’s startling game-changer film by the same name. It seems Rabin was correct to be outraged by this misuse of the term.
But in order to fully agree with his assertion that this was a misuse, you have to buy into Rabin’s definition of the term. Which I don’t.
First, I’m not convinced Rabin understands the MPDG well enough to decide whether it is being used correctly. Sure, he came up with a great name for a trend he observed, but he didn’t invent the actual construct that inspires writers. And he certainly didn’t invent the thing that makes guys think it’s OK to dispose of us when they’re feeling better about themselves.
As Clementine says in Eternal Sunshine,
"Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a f*cked-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours."
In the end, Clementine isn’t disposed of. She’s fully seen and then she’s fought for. Does that mean she’s not a MPDG? I still believe she is.
For weeks after I read his Salon article, I wondered what gives Nathan Rabin the right to wish away this term?
Rabin gave us a framework to call out the men who desired us solely because they wanted us to be their little human nightlights. Then, in a moment of truly meta pique, he wished he could take it away.
I understand why Zoe Kazan pushed back against the trope when promoting Ruby Sparks. Calling Ruby a MPDG was to literally miss the point of the film. But once we step away from Rabin’s limited definition, we see that Ruby Sparks may actually be the ultimate MPDG film — and Rabin simply hadn’t understood the full breadth of the term.
What if, all along, there was nothing wrong with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?
What if the actual problem was that it was a man who tried to define her — and thusly limited her potential?
Think of this scene, at the very end of Eternal Sunshine. She is who she is, she’s done with the bullshit, and he loves her anyway. And she’s willing to be loved.
Even the quirky and seemingly stereotypical “Summer” in (500) Days of Summer calls out the Garden State-variety MPDG. Yes, she’s a Smiths-listening, vintage-wearing gal with heavy bangs, but the latter half of the film shows the ways in which JGL’s Tom hadn’t been seeing Summer, even as he stared at her with so much longing.
People seem to forget how much of (500) Days of Summer is dedicated to showing the ways in which Summer wasn’t actually enjoying a portion of their time together, how much of his adoration was actually objectification. Sure, I’d love to have seen more of the depth of Summer in that film, but in the end, it’s Tom’s film. It’s about Tom not being able to wish Summer into being the right woman for him.
I say we leave behind Rabin’s limited definition of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, the one that says she, by definition, has to be written poorly and objectified by screenwriters. What if we allow the term to grow and expand to fill the ways in which women need it to?
There can still be good MPDG films and bad ones. Elizabethtown? Bad. Eternal Sunshine? Good. There can be well-written MPDGs and poorly-written ones. There can be ones that feel dated five years later and ones that feel timeless when my daughter watches them when she’s 45, like me.
There can be movies that tell stories about what happens to the Manic Pixie Dream Girls: what happens when men see us as wholly human, when we become mothers, when we fall in love with a woman, when we find the right combination of meds, when we’re no longer cute or mysterious, when we let down our guard. I’d love to see a movie about what happens to the women whom the world sees as MPDGs when we grow old.
There are more stories to tell, and I hope filmmakers aren’t afraid to tell them.
Also read: I Used To Be A Girl Who Wrote Poems That Boys Saved